


A Young Maid's Wits

by reconditarmonia



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Madness, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-13
Updated: 2011-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 08:22:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ophelia doesn't go mad suddenly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Young Maid's Wits

When Ophelia is twelve, her mother brings her into the castle garden to gather flowers for her grandmother’s grave. The garden is small -- Elsinore is a fortress, built to keep watch over the Sound, not a pleasure palace, and one corner is used for growing kitchen herbs, cicely, dill, angelica. In the midwinter cold, a few hardy lavender blooms and small near-colorless violets, clinging improbably to the chalky soil where a bramble bush shelters them from the wind, are all the blooms it can offer. Her mother shows Ophelia how to rub the lavender leaves between her fingers and hold them up to her nose to sniff, then tucks an already-dry and brittle stalk behind Ophelia’s ear before she bends down to break off the short stems of the violets.

It is an unaccustomed tenderness from her; Ophelia is left standing with the scent of lavender in her nose before she remembers her mother telling her that violets and lavender were the flowers her own mother, Ophelia’s grandmother, hid in the layers of her trousseau to keep the wool smelling sweet. The association, the memory of the scent lingering in her mother’s clothing even after years of childbearing and managing a household, must have brought her back to days before she was pinched and strict, watchful of her own daughter and less than prodigal of affection.

Distracted from her speculation by a sudden movement in the corner of her eye, Ophelia quickly turns her head to look; but it is only the lavender stalk behind her ear twitching in the breeze, and she hurriedly kneels to finish gathering the flowers. She and her mother together can only collect two handfuls; for a grandmother who died in midwinter, when all the snow outside could not cool her fever, two handfuls of flowers to strew a grave on a death anniversary must be enough.

Ophelia follows her mother back into the castle, leaving the garden bare until spring. As she closes the door behind her, she notices that she has cut the back of her hand on a bramble; but her skin is still numbed and her fingers stiff from cold and she does not feel any pain.

Ophelia is twelve, and her mother has been dead for six years.

* * *

 

They find her shivering in the cemetery: first a junior sexton, acting as night watchman, unsure whether he should go and fetch help for her or whether he should take care not to leave her alone, then his partner, who runs off to the castle and soon after runs back panting and lagging behind Ophelia’s brother. Laertes wraps her up in his cloak -- in his hurry he did not think to bring one for her, but he is eighteen years old and sees looking after her as his job -- and they hold a rational conversation until their father arrives, roused from his four-hour night’s sleep. When she sees him, the old him, it only makes her mother’s presence earlier more real, six years on; this is him before he, too, became stern and patriarchal to them, when she was alive.

This has happened before, but it is this different father, the one she remembers, whom she can tell about it. Laertes, who knows that Ophelia still sees their mother sometimes, tries to stop her, to provide another explanation for why she is there before she can get out that she came out to the cemetery tonight at one dead woman’s prompting to honor another. He does not succeed. Her father’s face shifts, almost imperceptibly, but the newer, sterner father is there now too. Ophelia knows her father does not believe in such things, but he would at times play along in a spirit of indulgence, before; now, even his care for her, finding her freezing out at night, when only some lucky chance let the sexton see her in the dark in her black mourning gown, does not allow it.

He takes her to visit her confessor the next morning, once she has slept. With her father watching from the other side of the room, the priest knows better than to ask the Lord Chamberlain’s daughter what she did to create such a vision, and thus the interview tends more towards spiritual advice than to confession. Having gently suggested that the image was the product of a troubled mind, he gives her a medallion of Saint Dymphna, and recommends calling on that maiden for aid. Ophelia accepts it with meek thanks, but shuts it in a drawer and keeps the medallion of Saint Lucy that she has had since she was very young. Seen from more than a foot or two away, one maiden depicted with a lamp looks like any other, so Ophelia can appease her father and confessor well enough. This Lucy has her eyes yet.

* * *

 

Meeting Lord Hamlet, years after this, is like meeting a kindred spirit. They have met and spoken before, in court, but she recognizes now something that he shares with her, something that is half memory and half vision. They do not talk about it, even when it is Laertes acting as chaperone, on his visits home from France, Laertes who knows about Ophelia; she gleans an idea from comments Lord Hamlet makes, from looks in his eyes.

She is not sure whether or not he would tell her even if the two of them could be alone and unobserved; a part of his particular lunacy (although Ophelia never puts this name to it, nor to her own) is a paranoia that she has never felt, that prevents him from revealing that lunacy even as it stems from it. He has not yet learned or needed to use his lunacy; he is the crown prince of Denmark and delight of his parents, he can have what he wants without any subterfuge, and his whims are taken as natural.

Ophelia has never lied, never claimed that she saw something she did not for sympathy or excuse. It would be disrespectful. Yet when her lessons in dance or sewing or courtly manners are over, it can sometimes come as a welcome relief, the always-unpredictable chance to sit at her mother’s feet and listen to stories of her life as a child and a young woman. This is what lets her tolerate the corsets and the conduct manuals, confining her and making it hard to breathe; it is like a breeze on a hot day, or the cool water of a brook. It is a pleasure she is sorry to see denied her father, who truly misses his wife; Ophelia wishes she could bring him back the way he was with her mother, but he will not believe that they can still see or speak to each other, he alive and she with the dirt covering up her eyes and stopping her mouth.

When Lord Hamlet begins to court her, Ophelia lets herself think that it is a prelude to real openness -- that soon he will tell her what he sees or feels, or that they will reach a place of such perfect understanding they can communicate in silence, with their eyes and thoughts. She strives to find deeper meanings in the words of love and the poetry, believes that a carved amethyst pendant on a silver chain was chosen because Lord Hamlet knows of her love for flowers, and, for a time, is happy.

Their resemblance proves to be a double-edged sword. It can only be his madness (although she still never calls it this; she has no word for it) that makes Lord Hamlet blow hot and cold, twist her fantasy of conversation without words into this frightening incident in her chamber. She does not think that she has betrayed him by telling her father of their meetings or giving him the letter, but the state in which she sees him, the things he says to her, shake that resolution; she does not know what she should think. They are not alike, she decides; her madness does not hurt people.

She longs for her mother’s guidance, severe as it might be, but it is not her mother’s nature to be conjured, and Ophelia visits the places they have walked together -- the castle garden, where the columbines are just beginning to grow -- in vain.

* * *

 

After the play collapses, Ophelia’s father sweeps her away. As he marches her down the corridor, Reynaldo, back from his mission in France, falls into line; he had been sitting and watching with the lower nobles and courtiers, but her father had signaled for him when the King called for lights. Her father speaks without stopping his walk, tells Reynaldo that he will send Lord Hamlet to the Queen and listen in on their interview, and orders the man to be ready to write up a report when it is over and he has the information that he needs.

It is as though she is not there. She is invisible, or a child, or too mad to understand. Hidden in her long sleeve she digs her fingernails into her palm until they make half-moons in the flesh, turns her hand to catch the Saint Lucy medallion on its thin ribbon around her wrist and grips it tightly until the icon is imprinted on her skin. Ophelia knows what it is to be watched and observed, and all of a sudden she cannot bear the thought of it; she cannot let it happen to someone else like her, however cruel he has been to her. She slips away; her father and Reynaldo do not notice her.

Running back towards the hall (she will be out of breath, but this is a thing that she must do) she encounters Lord Hamlet coming out of a smaller side chamber. "My lord," she gasps out, "my father -- he will be there --" He looks into her eyes, and there at last is that moment of perfect comprehension that she has been waiting for. He hurries on, and she sinks to her knees to catch her breath. She is in time.

* * *

 

Her father comes to see her shortly in her chamber, taking her to task for running off to speak to Lord Hamlet. She should have known, Ophelia thinks, that she could not escape unobserved; that her invisibility was that of an unreasonable listener who can discern sounds but not meaning and who can be allowed to overhear plots, not that of someone who can move freely and independently. She answers him calmly, enough to come across as penitent and submissive, but secure in the knowledge that for the first time in her life, she has made not being spied on into a privilege and claimed that freedom for her own -- for her own in the making of the decision, even if it was another who gained by it. They cannot watch her inside her head -- and that, she realizes even as she forms the thought, is why she spends time with her mother now.

Soon after he leaves, Reynaldo, her father’s man, raps hard at the door. He wants her to follow him out of her family’s apartments, into the main areas of the castle, but will not say why; his words trip over each other and he shakes his head and stops. She follows obediently, making some attempt at binding up her hair again even though she is dressed only in her shift. They reach the corridor leading off the royal suite, and she sees four men bearing out a form wrapped in a curtain. This is her father, and from the frantic whispers and occasional shouts she gathers that he is half an hour dead, but he visited her not ten minutes since, he who never believed in ghosts -- and she remembers telling Lord Hamlet that he would be there, had made it her mission to tell him so that her hands hurt from clenching them in anger and she was out of breath from running -- and she thought that her madness never hurt anyone, but she has murdered her own father --

Ophelia screams.

**Author's Note:**

> \--I made a point of dressing Ophelia in black because of the Hamlet-black Ophelia-white costuming/artistic convention; part of the point of this fic is making Hamlet not unique. See also "Representing Ophelia," Elaine Showalter, which discusses this briefly.  
> \--Ophelia's warning to Hamlet is the only spoken line in this fic. I wanted to write a warning that would be ambiguous enough that it might not have got the message across if it really had been spoken; Hamlet doesn’t know that Polonius is hiding behind the arras in III.4, so a less ambiguous utterance would have the effect of telling the reader that Ophelia was imagining this incident. However, I also didn’t want the line to be so vague that it was a cop-out. I wanted to leave both options open.


End file.
